


Flight

by HorseCrazyWriter76



Series: NaNoWriMo November 2019 [7]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Hints of an agnsty backstory, Winged!Roman, Winged!Virgil, a bit more than hints, not beta read or edited, okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 11:40:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21391546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HorseCrazyWriter76/pseuds/HorseCrazyWriter76
Summary: "It must be beautiful to see the sky span out in front of you when you fly.""It is. Would you like to see?"Prompt: https://scrawl-your-heart-out.tumblr.com/post/185121104091/it-must-be-beautiful-when-you-see-the-sky-span
Series: NaNoWriMo November 2019 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1541089
Comments: 10
Kudos: 62





	Flight

It had been a long time since Virgil could fly. It had been a choice, thought over long and hard for several anxious years of waiting for someone to discover his secret. Finally, after narrowly avoiding being discovered one too many times, he had done the inevitable and cut them off. 

It hadn’t been the wrong choice. He felt more confident now that he didn’t have to worry about feathers drifting down or his wings popping out of his shirt. He didn’t miss the wings themselves, but he did miss the sky. He missed having the wide open expanse around him with only clouds on all sides. He missed racing birds, although they were races that he mostly lost. He missed being able to float above it all. At times like these when he missed the sky, he reminded himself what happened when they first sprouted. He had been proud. The other children were interested. The news spread. He taught himself to fly. The scientists came knocking. There had been yelling. He had fled into the sky and flown as far as he could before hiding in a tree. He had waited up there, shivering, for an entire night before climbing down and finding a map to figure out how to get home. He had collapsed into his mother’s arms and they moved the next day. 

Virgil shook away his thoughts and shifted his headphones over his ears, letting the familiar tune of Helena peel away the last cobwebs of his memories. A shadow passed over him and he glanced up, expecting the form of a bird passing overhead, or maybe a stray tuft of cloud. Instead it was a person with long, multi-colored wings stretched to the edge of their limits. He turned his head back to the pavement and kicked off down the street towards his apartment. He tried the door, finding it locked. His roommate, Roman, must have gotten held up with something at the theatre. He fished his keys out of his back pocket and opened the door just as there was a loud thump and a grunt behind him. 

He whipped around, keys held like a sword towards the source. There was a woosh of air as a blur of color shot behind the back of his sheepish roommate, who was kneeling on the front steps with torn jeans and bloody knees. Virgil looked from Roman’s face to his knees, then back again. 

“Jeez, work on your landing, Princey,” He scoffed and dropped the keys into the purple bowl with a spider in it on the little table next to the door. He heard Roman get up and come in, closing the door behind him.

“Don’t get blood on the carpet, oh, and one more thing,” Virgil said without turning to Roman.

“At your service?” he heard the hesitation in Roman’s voice.

“What the frick were you thinking flying in broad daylight?” he pivoted on one foot and swung his hand towards Roman’s face, missing by about an inch, although it still had the desired effect of him flinching backwards. 

“It’s a beautiful day!”

“And people are jerks.”

“What I want to know is why you haven’t even commented on the fact that I was flying.”

“Mhm, ‘Jeez, work on your landing, Princey,’ and ‘what the frick were you thinking flying in broad daylight,’ aren’t comments anymore?”

“But you aren’t surprised.”

“Well, I’m surprised that  _ you  _ have them specifically, but yeah, I already knew some people have wings.”

Roman lifted a wing as if surprised by the mention of it. Virgil stalked off into the bathroom and returned with a first aid kit.

“Sit,” he snapped, pointing at the couch.

“How did you know people have wings?”

“My sister had wings,” Virgil lied, kneeling next to him and pulling a cleansing wipe and bandages from the kit.

“You’re an only child.”

“Roll up your pant legs,” Virgil avoided the comment and started in on cleaning the scrape, perhaps a bit more forcefully than he strictly needed to. Roman was silent, twitching when Virgil started cleaning the second scrape, but otherwise staying still.

“How did you know people have wings?”

“I just told you,” Virgil replied, checking his supply of cleansing wipes and bandages. He made a mental note to pick up more bandages when he next went to the store. 

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” Roman huffed, bending and flexing his knees.

“Leave the bandage on at least until tonight to let it start healing,” Virgil replied curtly and walked off to replace his first aid kit. He poked his head into the living room, and sure enough Roman was picking at the edge of the bandage.

“I will duct tape you to the wall if that’s what it takes,” he said, completely deadpan. Roman’s head shot up, and he smoothed down the edge of the bandage. 

“I’ll leave it if you tell me why you know how some people have wings,” Roman tried in a singsong voice. Virgil flipped him off and opened the door to his room, immediately face-planting into the pillows. 

What had he been thinking? Criticizing his landing outside, yelling at him when they had paper thin walls(the neighbors on all sides have work right now, except for Patton from the apartment above who volunteered for the animal shelter, the reasonable part of his brain reminded him. The anxious part of his brain beat the reasonable part of his brain over the head with a frying pan.), telling him his sister had wings when he was an only child, telling him he’d duct tape him to the wall. 

He lay there with his head in the pillow for a few minutes, then peeled himself up and sat down in front of his computer, opening it up. He mulled over what to do in the few seconds that it took to power on. He flipped the power switch on his drawing tablet and picked up his stylus before slipping the anti-weird-lines-because-of-resting-your-hand-on-the-tablet glove onto his right hand. He pulled up his art program and started doodling, trying to figure out what he wanted to draw. He pulled up a new layer and drew a circle, slowly sketching in a silhouette as details made their way into his mind’s eye. He looked up at his sketch layer. It was a man who looked a bit like Virgil and a bit like Roman who looked back up at him. His wings stretched out to their full extent and a black bird flew along just above him, their wings stretched out to their full extent, too. A series of puffy, cartoonish clouds spiraled around them. He shook out his hand and started in on the line work. He started dumping colors onto the pallet to see what looked good, decided he wasn’t happy with any of it, and saved it on his desktop as WIP37. His computer alerted him that he already had a file under that name and he changed it to WIP38, which was accepted by the computer.

He opened up tumblr and scrolled through it for a bit, mindlessly liking and reblogging stuff. He glanced at the clock and was surprised to see it was already 6, and it was his turn to wrangle together a dinner. He logged out of his laptop and walked into the kitchen, poking his nose into the pantry to see what he could use. He didn’t feel like cooking anything elaborate, so he set some water to boil for pasta and tossed in some veggies and a hot dog so that it counted as health food.

Roman came out of his room, a bit of paint on his cheek giving Virgil a pretty good guess as to what he had been doing before smelling the dinner that was almost done. He was still letting his wings fall outside of his shirt, which was a v-neck turned backwards so that his wings had space to clear the fabric. Virgil leaned over the counter to check if he had pulled the bandages off, feeling a bit too much like an overprotective mother for his liking, but he had changed his pants as well as his shirt.

“Any questions for the prince with wings?” he asked, shaking his wings as an emphasis.

“How many times did you land on your head as a kid?”

“Serious inquiries only.”

“Mm, how does the sky look? I bet it’s pretty up that high,” Virgil decided to give him a rest.

“It’s gorgeous! Would you like to see?”

“Can you land without skinning your knees?”

“Yes, in fact. I was...working on a trick.”

“I don’t believe you,” Virgil replied, pulling the pot off of the stove and into the strainer. 

“I was trying to land on my knees, but slow enough that I wouldn’t skin them.”

“That’s difficult.”

“Nothing more fitting for a prince!”

“...and stupid. Why not stick to landing normally and flying at night?”

“It’s so much prettier at sunset.”

“You were flying in broad daylight.”

“I wanted to see if I could do it.” 

Virgil sighed and climbed onto the counter so that he could stare down at Roman.

“My offer to take you flying is still open.”

“I think it’s stupid, but my brain is forcing me to consider it.”

*****

“This feels incredibly stupid,” Virgil said, looking down at the contraption Roman had thrown together to hold him while they were flying. It essentially looked like an overcomplicated swing seat.

“If you rather I could hold you bridal style.”

“This suddenly feels a lot less stupid,” Virgil replied, sitting down and messing with the straps at Roman’s instruction. It didn’t actually feel any less stupid, but regardless he ran along with Roman, then along until he tilted them upward. He had to give him credit, flying so low was tricky when you didn’t have an extra passenger. They climbed up gently, then Roman adjusted his angle so that they coasted just below the cloud layer. Virgil looked around him.

It was even more beautiful than he remembered. The tiny landscape, barely visible except for the lights, beneath them filled him with a giggly feeling, and the wind managed to tear a smile onto his face. Roman flew in a wide arc before gliding down smoothly. Virgil ran and slowed down with Roman, climbing out of the contraption as quickly as possible and fixing a neutral look on his face. He was fairly sure Roman had seen a bit of his smile, which he would deny as long as he lived.


End file.
